Frostmoon scions

They crossed in late morning.

Shenhe walked to the waterline, set her palm to the air, and laid a bridge as if the channel had asked her a simple question. Ice ran out in a clean span, wide enough for packs and people, thick enough that no one performed balance for sport. The distance was not the problem. What changed was the feel of the place once their boots left the first island’s scrap-metal honesty and took Hiisi instead.

The moon sat on this ground harder.

Not a sermon. Not a glow you could point at and be done. The plants had a pale, fed look, leaves turned as if they kept a calendar that was not the sun’s. The air smelled colder and sweeter at once, like frost and crushed petals and something metallic underneath. Even the light seemed decided. Aether felt it on his teeth. Citlali, walking with her hood not quite low enough, pressed two fingers to her temple once and then dropped the hand, as if daring the island to start shouting again.

They did not have to hunt for the Scions.

The camp announced itself the way a city announced a holiday: noise first, then color, then the press of too many bodies that had all come for the same name. Hundreds, then the sense of a thousand, packed into an enclave that had outgrown the word campsite. Banners. Stalls. Painted boards. Little carved moons on cords, cheap and expensive in the same row. Fabric printed with a woman’s silhouette that might have been divine and might have been a singer. Someone was selling soup. Someone else was selling pins. A knot of devotees posed together while a third sketched them.

It looked less like a cloister than a convention that had forgotten to invite anyone who did not already believe.

Dehya’s mouth went flat.

“I hate this already,”
she said, not loud.
“Too many smiles. Too many hands empty on purpose.”

Rosaria’s eyes moved the way they moved in a cathedral she did not trust. Shenhe did not comment. Citlali muttered that fanatics always smelled like ink and sweat, which was not wrong.

The gate — if a rope and two polite people with identical pins counted as a gate — stopped them before the first stall.

“Sacred ground,”
the woman on the left said, pleasant, rehearsed.
“No weapons past the line. You may leave them here. They will be kept. You will be given a token.”

Dehya’s hand had already found the place her blade usually sat.

“And if I like my steel where I can reach it.”

“Then you stay on that side of the rope,”
the man on the right said, still pleasant.
“The Moon does not receive armed guests. Ordinary visitors understand.”

Ordinary. The word sat wrong in Aether’s ear. The crowd beyond the rope did not look dangerous. They looked busy. That was the part Dehya’s instincts were chewing on: busy like a festival, and festivals were where people stopped watching the exits.

Rosaria glanced at Aether. He could feel the math the others were doing without speaking it. Cloud Retainer and Ganyu were in Nasha chasing a witch who might not come. all be it not at full strenght, it still left enough in this party to break a street of unarmed devotees if the smiles turned. Shenhe alone could ruin a morning. Dehya did not need a sword to make a man regret a decision.

“We came to talk,” Aether said. “Not to decorate your racks.”

“Then you talk without steel,”
the woman said, and held out a shallow box of wooden tokens as if that settled the theology.

Dehya’s jaw worked. She looked at the enclave, at the market sprawl, at the way the crowd moved like it had practiced being harmless.

“Something is off,”
she said, for him, for Rosaria.
“I don’t know what. I know I don’t like leaving teeth at the door.”

“Noted,”
Rosaria said.
“We are still going in. I want to see the idol they printed on those flags before I decide if this is a church or a shop.”

They made the split there, on the ugly side of the rope, where the ice-bridge cold still clung to their coats.

Lisa took the watch without being asked, already scanning the attendants the way she scanned a syllabus for a lie. Xilonen had been eyeing the pile of left steel and polearms and Dehya’s claymore-substitute like a woman who had found a legitimate excuse to stop walking.

“I wanted time with the edges anyway,”
Xilonen said.
“If they are going to sit in a box, they can sit correctly.”
She hooked two fingers in Lynette’s collar, not cruel, proprietary.
“You. Stay. Hold what I hand you. Do not wander off to be helpful to strangers.”

Lynette’s ears tipped forward. “Yes.”

Ineffa remained with them as well.

That left five to cross the rope.

Aether. Rosaria. Shenhe. Dehya. Citlali.

The market noise coming up like a tide.

Dehya went last, as if the act of stepping over the line personally offended her. She rolled her shoulders once, a fighter pretending her hands were enough because they usually were.

“If this turns into a riot” she said, “I am going to be very rude about it.”

“Good,”
Rosaria answered, already moving into the press of devotees.
“I prefer you rude.”

Inside, the convention-feeling thickened. People wore the same pins in different metals. A stall sold little books of hymns that looked like concert programs. A child ran past with a paper moon on a stick. Somewhere deeper in the enclave a voice was calling a name with the bright, practiced affection of a crowd that had come to see a favorite and would riot politely if the favorite was late.

Citlali’s mouth twisted.

“Idol,” she said. “Lisa was not guessing.”